How The Brain Sees

If you think about it, the eyes may be tasked with collecting imagery from the world around us. However, it is the brain’s job to make sense of the information collected by the eyes and enable us to see. Further, researchers wanted to know whether there is an area of the brain that is actually responsible for reading. Using functional MRI (fMRI) brain scans, it was found that people reading Braille activate the exact same part of the brain as sighted people use. This finding upends the conventional theory that the brain is divided into specialized regions which process the information they receive via one sense or another. According to this research, the brain is not so much a “sensory” machine as it is a “task” machine that can perform a function regardless of where the sensory input comes from.